The maddest melee of the day now ensued. Athenians like ants swarmed upon the impaled dreadnought. The dead made a carpet upon the sea. Our men hauled themselves bare-handed up the shafts of the enemy's oars, hacking at her bankers through the hide-defended ports, while the foe's marines piked in return from topside and their archers rained fire point-blank. Pitch bolts which the enemy's bowmen had flung into the beached craft of Athens, our men now plucked still blazing and slung again upon the assailants. The Corinthian was going down now, adding her hulk to the fragile bastion which yet preserved us. Out beyond the stakes another dozen men-of-war had drawn up broadside, deep in shadow, archers launching their tow shafts upon us while their oarsmen sang the paean in triumph and joy.
I found Lion in the wash of bodies. Chowder was dead, Splinter slain earlier with an ax. The waves, barely enough to topple an infant, buffeted us to our knees; we must crab in on hips and elbows, shuddering with such violence as to no longer command our own limbs.
Our cousin Simon hauled us from the soup. He got wine into us, clasping me in his cloaked embrace; others swathed Lion, abrading his flesh to restore the warmth of blood. Despair rang from every quarter, such chagrin more acute among those unable this day to fight, the army and the wounded who could only look on without striking a blow. I glanced up the strand and thought, This is what hell must look like.
Above us a knot of seamen labored to resuscitate a comrade. No hope. At last the final man yielded and pitched. Night was on us.
Across the darkening field the warships of the foe quartered, piking the last of our seamen bereft upon the swell and calling that we would not tarry long to join them. Beside Lion and my cousin, the clutch of sailors peered hollow-eyed on this tableau.
“Did you see him out there?” one uttered in awe and dread. “He was on the ships, fighting for the enemy.”
“He was there when they broke us, leading them.”
“No one could stand before him.”
What nonsense was this? Would these morons claim to have descried Poseidon, or Zeus himself, among the champions of the foe?
“Who the hell are you talking about?” I demanded. “What phantom do you madmen think you saw?”
The sailor turned as if I were the madman.
“Alcibiades,” he declared.
XXIV
Later, in the quarries, one of our number inquired of a Syracusan warden if Alcibiades had in fact been present at the battle of the harbor.
The keeper laughed in his face. “You can concoct handier fictions than that, Athenians. Or can you still not believe you could be beaten other than by one of your own?”
There is a crime in Sicily which the non-Greek natives call demortificare. It means to occasion someone to experience shame or, equally blameworthy, to be aware of such distress and take no action to relieve it. Among the Syracusans, who have embraced the concept as their own, this is an offense graver than murder, which they regard as an act of passion or honor and thus sanctioned or at least condoned by the gods. Demortificare is different. lance witnessed a boy, one of our laundry urchins, beaten half-senseless by his father for permitting his female cousin to sit alone at a dance.
The Syracusans hated us for a thousand causes, but beyond all for having surrendered to them. It was Lion who remarked this, in the branding kennels, compiling observations for his historia, which he kept now in his head and recited aloud to keep his mates from cracking. “The Syracusans can absolve us for bringing war upon them. They may abide even the despoliation of their city and the slaughter of their sons. But they will never forgive us for our shame. ”
You are a gentleman, Jason, but you are also a warrior. And you call yourself a philosopher. I believe you are. Do you know why I sought you out to aid me in my defense? Not because I believed you could help. None can; my grave is dug. Rather I imposed on you out of self-interest. I wanted to meet you. I have admired you since Potidaea. Will it surprise you to learn that I have followed your career, as much as one may at the remove at which I found myself from the city of my birth? I know of the death, or murder, of your two dear sons at the hands of the Thirty. I know the ruin brought upon the family of your second wife. I am aware of the peril in which you placed yourself and your kin, defending the younger Pericles before the Assembly; I have read your speech and admire it greatly. To own to honor lifelong is no mean feat.
Yet I flatter myself that I share with a man such as yourself, if not qualities of honor, then of perception. Here is my crime, and to account it I haul all Greece into the dock beside me: to save my skin I abandoned my fellows, both on the field and within my heart. But let us plumb this unbosoming. I abandoned not only my brothers but myself. To save myself, I abandoned myself.
All vice springs from the flesh; your master Socrates teaches as much, does he not? As Agathon sets in the speech of Palamedes before Troy, himself on trial for his life:
… to the extent to which a man unites his self-conception to his flesh, to that measure will he be a villain. To the extent he unites it with his soul, he will be divine.
But who among us has done that? Your master indeed. Men hate him for this, because to acknowledge his nobility is to concede their own baseness, and this they can never do. They hate him as fire hates water, as evil hates good.
We who have abandoned our countrymen and our own nobler natures, we whom long and brutal war has compelled to such abjuration, is there one, other than ourselves, who may be called our object? One whom we have individually and collectively abandoned?
Who else but Alcibiades? Not once but three times did Athens spurn him, when he knelt before her proffering all he owned. And what made Athens hate him more? Just this: that he repudiated her abandonment. Compelled by his own proud nature, in which he confuted himself and his native land, Alcibiades demonstrated this truth of the souclass="underline" that which we cast out returns to revenge itself.
How apt that Athens reviles these twain as few others: the most measured of men, your master, and the most reckless, his friend.
And they hate both for the same reason. Because each-one bearing the lamp of wisdom, the other the brand of glory-illumined that glass in whose reflection his countrymen may see their own self-forsaken souls.
But I have strayed afield. Let us return to the Great Harbor, to defeat and its issue…
With Chowder's death and Splinter's, Pandora had lost all her original marines except myself and Lion. Of our fourteen after Iapygia had fallen to wounds Meton called Armbreaker, Teres called Skull, Adrastus called Towhead, Colophon Redbeard, and Memnonides; to disease Hagnon called the Small, Stratus, Maron, and Diagoras; deserted Theodectes and Milon the pentathlete. If the measure of an officer be the number of his command he restores to home alive, this roster speaks with its own eloquence. I may say in defense only this: none did better. Of sixty thousand free citizens, subject-state volunteers, and conscripts inclusive of both fleets, fewer than a thousand made it home, and these on their own and only after appalling trials.
The fault I own as mine, for my men. The tuition in obedience I had received as a boy, reinforced by the code acquired in the mercenary service, was too severe, too Spartan if you will, to be imposed upon Athenians, particularly the unpropertied roughnecks who constituted the bulk of the latter-day fleet marine force. Courage and initiative they owned in abundance.
They were born to debate and disputation, abashed by no authority established over them, brash and spirited and untamable as cats. Invincible when events ran their way, they could not summon the self-command to rally when the sky began to rain shit, nor was I, or Lion, capable of inspiriting it in them. They personified that type of warrior who beneath a commander of vision and audacity may roll resistlessly from success to success.